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Comment by gregorkas | Hacker News Reader

I still think that they didn't "Hack" the TouchID as they claim. Faking a finger print is one thing, but truly hacking it is completely another.

Imagine a scenario in which you find an iPhone (or "borrow" it) - how do you unlock it without knowing the owner and having access to their fingerprints? You don't, not with this "hack".

A cool demonstration of the fingerprint lifting technique though.

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Glass is a good surface for lifting fingerprints from, and the phone itself is likely to have multiple fingerprints of the user on it, but even if not it's not too hard to get fingerprints from someone without their knowledge.

I believe the article mentions that the iPhone is a relatively poor surface to obtain fingerprints from because there's an extremely high chance they would already be smudged.

Thanks, just gone to read it. I think they do show up sometimes though - look at this video when they turn the screen off:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM8b8d8kSNQ

Several very clear fingerprints are visible on the glass.

The question of whether fingerprints obtained this way are good enough to fool TouchId is still unanswered.

If it were this easy, why do the hacks use carefully made fingerprints from clean polished glass?

What matters is not whether one pristine fingerprint can fool TouchID (note that we don't know how many failed attempts were made), but what percentage of fingerprints found in the wild can fool it.

Which is exactly why I don't anyone of these "hackers" deserves the bounty people set out for this.

It explicitly states "prints lifted like from a beer mug" and so far, all I have seen were prints lifted in a laboratory setting. Nothing real world about it.

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